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A Midsummer Night's Dream
'Out of doubt he is transported.'
"As part of their Summer Theatre Season, The Mechanicals bring you an inspired production of A Midsummer Nights Dream, directed and designed by Guy De Lancey. This hallucinogenic rendition of Shakespeare's play creates a portal into a nightmarish landscape of obsession and desire, steering away from any clichéd notions of a frivolous fairy kingdom that may be attached to the text. While maintaining an intelligent humour, this atmospheric production plunges into the psychological darkness, uncertainty and obsession of dreamscapes, as different planes of reality merge to create a kaleidoscope of strange meetings and voyeurisms."
Dark, twisted and awesome
March 8 2011 at 08:09pm By Zane Henry
It’s not very often one gets to write that a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is kick-ass. So, thanks guys.
The Mechanicals take the Bard’s beloved comedy and flip it neatly and bravely, revealing the underside of characters all too often clothed in frippery and frivolity. It’s dark, it’s twisted, it’s awesome.
Productions traditionally delight in the potential of the sylvan setting and load themselves with prettiness and whimsy at the expense of the play’s dark under-currents. Guy de Lancey and his team don’t so much dip their toes in it as dive in, grow gills and swim around the bottom like naughty, sexy sharks.
The story stays the same: young lovers elope to a nearby forest where they are enchanted by mischievous fairies. Hermia (Emily Child) is in love with Lysander (Andrew Laubscher), but her father Egeus (Jeroen Kronenburg) wants her to marry Demetrius (Shaun Acker) who is being pursued by Hermia’s friend, Helena (Julia Anastasopoulos). The four young lovers escape to the forest where they are observed by the fairy king Oberon (Scott Sparrow), himself caught up in a love tangle with his beloved queen Titania (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots). Oberon directs the loyal Puck (Adrian Collins) to anoint Titania and the humans’ eyes with juice from a special flower, which acts as a love potion.
What usually ensues at this point is a light comedy of mistaken identities, inverted affections and crowd- pleasing resolutions. This production, however, where almost every character is a dark and twisted mirror image of their usual selves, refuses to play it safe and instead explores obsession, dementia and the nature of love. The humans are silly little puppets to be toyed with by the otherworldly inhabitants of the forest. The latter are portrayed more as demons than fairies.
The production design is instrumental in conveying that this is more of a nightmare than a dreamscape. So we have Oberon wearing a tunic that looks like a straitjacket, a rope tied around his waist and blood dripping from his mouth. Titania’s misshapen teeth and gothic dress conveys macabre majesty.
The set design of dry bushes, mirrors and curtains augments the sinister atmosphere, as does Guy de Lancey’s excellent lighting design.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. The play has a nimble sense of humour and sports great physical comedy. The performances are excellent, with Collins’ stoic Puck, Arumugam’s pompous Bottom and Child’s formidable Hermia being standouts.
It’s a hell of a show.
Mechanicals return to form in boisterous fashion
REVIEW: Peter Tromp
When I reviewed the Mechanicals show ‘The Great Gatsby’ about a month ago, I bemoaned that things had become slightly formulaic for the theatre company, or at least safe. Little did I know at the time that the group had a massive ace up their collective sleeves. As if on cue to make reviewers look ridiculous, the group has returned with one of the most enjoyable, inventive and strangest Shakespeare productions I have seen, probably ever.
Director Guy De Lancey has concocted something that foregrounds the brunt of the restless randiness and humour of Shakespeare’s perennially popular play to winning effect. A Shakespeare comedy where one actually laughs, and a lot? Believe it.
Almost all of the Mechanicals, plus a few guests, are out in full force and it is indeed a welcome sight to see them almost completely unshackled. That’s not to say that it is one insufferably indulgent affair, or worse, an industry inside joke. De Lancey is far too sly for that. It is instead a wonderfully raucous and accessible production.
Not being much of a fan of the play, I was surprised at how much I was invested in what was going on. De Lancey clearly paid attention to the basics first, as almost all of the language is spoken audibly, something that is hardly ever the case with local Shakespeare productions, and the characters are all easily identifiable and distinctive.
The sense of play for which the Mechanicals are so well loved is on full display, yet there is no demure shying away from the darker currents of the play; you get the sense that the rehearsals must have been a blast. This fully translates to the audience.
De Lancey has made some instinctual and bold choices, and almost all of them pan out. For starters, he has transformed the Intimate Theatre into something at once enchanting, but also foreboding and expansive through the use of some simple but highly effective choices.
His casting is almost perfect throughout as well. Actors like Scott Sparrow and Emily Child, who have been allowed to coast on their personas alone of late, here deliver their best performances for a while and remind us how versatile and just plain fantastic they can be when utilised correctly by a director.
Adrian Collins as Puck is a lot of fun in his various outlandish yet stylish outfits, but also a little intimidating and Tinarie van Wyk Loots projects a regal bearing without sacrificing her naturalness as an actress.
A Midsummer Night’s Traum: A review of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented by The Mechanicals and directed by Guy de Lancey.
Thou art translated.
(III, i, 124-5)
Out of doubt he is transported.
(IV, I, 3-4)
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), presented by ‘The Mechanicals’ and directed by Guy De Lancey opened to positive reviews at The Intimate Theatre, Cape Town this March. The performance, roundly praised for its ‘dark’ and ‘unconventional’ approach to an essentially comic play, offers yet another opportunity to reflect upon the situation of Shakespeare in South Africa.[1]
These reflections are initiated by questions pertaining not only to the manner in which Shakespeare’s play-texts—which are generally accepted as canonical, settled works of genius—are translated into the more fluid medium of dramatic performance (as if that were not difficult enough already) but also upon the situation and re-situation of his works long after and far from their ‘original’ contexts, in ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘foreign’ places and at different times. Shakespeare’s plays are transported; in the transfer (from text to stage, through time, from place to place) they are also translated from their presumably ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ setting in Elizabethan England as they are performed elsewhere, and else-when, and always in a different key. [2] If this seems to suggest, simply, the commonplace that art travels, any interest in Shakespeare’s translation within a South African context is vexed further still (if such were possible!) by questions pertaining to the (presumably) marginal colony to the Imperial centre; the place of English, as a ‘colonial’ language, within a ‘post-colonial’ setting; the place of Shakespeare, as the poet of British imperialism, as a continuing presence among a community of naturalised post-imperial settlers who may treasure Shakespeare as a nostalgic symbol of a distant heritage, former subalterns who may not, and others who fall uncomfortably in-between.
It would be difficult, and slightly unfair, to apply this rather nebulous set of concerns to Guy de Lancey and the Mechanicals’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the popular reviews intimate when they praise the purportedly ‘unconventional’ approach to the play (one reviewer insists that this production is unlike any Shakespeare he has seen, another revels in the suggestion that the production turns Shakespeare’s rather twee dream into a nightmare)
Shakespeare is somewhat old-fashioned, dated, tiresome, in desperate need of some serious shaking up. The blurb on the Mechanicals’ web-page with its use of epithets such as ‘inspired’, ‘hallucinogenic’, ‘atmospheric’, and its presentation of the play as ‘a portal into a nightmarish landscape of obsession and desire, steering away from any cliché’d [sic] notions of a frivolous fairy kingdom that may be attached to the text’, appears to reinforces such readings which, commonplace though they may be, announce a general desire for the excesses of spectacle.[3] Yet if these opinions suggest a desire to announce ‘our’ distance from Shakespeare’s world, to insist that Shakespeare speak in ‘our’ voices and that he speak to ‘our’ concerns, I feel that there is much more to be said about the dynamic interaction between the ‘conventional’ or clichéd assumptions about the play and the ‘unconventional’ version. De Lancey and the The Mechanicals’ do not issue a complete break with convention in favour of a narcissistic pursuit of spectacle.
The epigraphs bracketing more spectacular advertisement for the play on the Mechanicals’ web-page, for instance, seem to suggest that the company is presenting Shakespeare, not simply as spectacle, but according to carefully selected set of mediations. This version of the play, therefore, is framed by statements by Nietzsche (‘Believe me, man’s truest madness is disclosed to him in dreams’) and Anna Freud (‘It always takes two events to create a trauma – one occurring in reality, and the other in the representation of that reality. Or, at least, in the discourse of others involving the person at the centre of the event.’) This, then, is Shakespeare seen through the lens of twentieth-century discourses on dreams, madness, and existential trauma. More broadly, we might imagine that the presiding spirits hovering on the edges of de Lancey’s Shakespeare are Nietzsche’s will-to-power on the one hand, and Post-Freudian psychoanalytical ‘hollowing out’ of the subject on the other. The tension ought to be immediately apparent: if Nietzsche had been the prophet of an egocentric imposition of will upon the other, students of Freud (or, perhaps, Sartre’s existentialism) dispel such agency with the suggestion that the self is always limited by its entrapment in the discourse of the other.
It seems useful to imagine, therefore, that if this adaptation follows the well-known contours of Shakespeare’s text relatively closely, does so to enter into creative dialogue with more conventional readings of the play’s genre, tone, and occasion. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is classed as a comedy, de Lancey and co. suggest that the humour is meant to disturb rather than to entertain; if the tone of Shakespeare’s Dream is conventionally regarded as light and airy, de Lancey’s version seems dark and earthy; if, as Tony Tanner has suggested, the play had originally been written for a celebratory occasion—‘probably a noble wedding in a great house’—here incumbent marriage seems anything but the occasion for celebration. Inversions such as these only work in relation to some acknowledgement of conventional alternatives.
The difference is largely motivated by de Lancey’s commitment to inversion, and it is interesting to consider that the extent of this inversion in relation to the play ad the performances’ respective attitudes towards love and marriage. If the troubled movement toward marriage, which remains present in more conventional readings of the play, anticipates a happy reconciliation, de Lancey and the mechanicals appear to suggest that marriage presents a less satisfactory answer to pre-marital discord. This is apparent, along with the aforementioned keynotes of madness and entrapment, in the seemingly incongruous opening of de Lancey’s adaptation. Here we find a giggling Theseus (Adam Neill) holding up a length of thread, which he examines with manic glee. It gradually emerges, as Theseus’ laughter continues to rise, that the thread leads to and binds a suitably unimpressed Hippolyta (Danieyella Rodin). The fact that Hippolyta remains bound to Theseus for the remainder of the play, and that she resists such bondage as well as she might, suggests that impending marriage, in this instance at least, is invested with the sadistic (if not quite sado-masochistic) power of the relationship characterised by the dialectic between master and servant.
Nor is this the only instance, nor indeed the sole manner of representing, matrimonial bonds. Oberon (Scott Sparrow) trails a thick coil of rope behind him and, much later, Fairy (a composite of Pease-Blossom, Moth, Mustard-Seed and Cobweb played by Dorian Burstein) weaves lengths of twine around Bottom (Vaneshran Arumugam) when Titania (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots) commands that he be led to her bower (III, i, 205-6). For Oberon, who wears a bloodstained tunic that recalls an unfastened straitjacket, severance from the bonds of marriage seems to lead to unbounded madness. With respect to Titania, on the other hand, the motif of thread and binding has a more seductive connotation but, since the seduction occurs while she is under the magical influence of the flower, Love-in-idleness, it also suggests that she is not herself. Nevertheless, the flower does liberate her sexuality, which is seen to be predatory and deviant, even as her bower anticipates another ‘elfin grot’ and the deathly intimations that go with it:
And there she lulled me asleep,
And There I dreamed, Ah Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
(Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci 1996, 843, ll.33-36)
Between the problematically united Theseus and Hippolyta and the estranged Oberon and Titania lie the primary set of relationships and confusions driving the play forward. Lysander (Andrew Laubscher), Hermia (Emily Child) Demetrius (Shaun Acker), and Helena (Julia Anastasopoulos) are all beset by discord primarily due to unhappiness in love and potential marriage. Yet if de Lancey remains ambivalent about the role marriage might play in settling discordant relationships fraught by sexual waywardness, he refuses to revel in the purported delights of sexual waywardness.
This is most evident when Helena, who with the help of Love-in-idleness, finds herself to be the object of both Lysander and Demetrius’ affections, struggles to fend off their attentions. The physicality with which the players dramatise desire here seems comical at first but with time it comes to seem nothing if not disturbing. Lysander and Demetrius grope, grab, smother and tug at Helena, and her attempts to maintain some kind of composure soon descends into a more primal urge to save herself from being physically overwhelmed by her suitors’ ‘love’. If love consumes, de Lancey suggests, the physical expression of that love may well threatens, quite literally, to tear us apart. Amid the squalling complaints and exaggerated declamations and the wearying and terrifying physical imposition of body upon body we hear the echo of Freud’s suggestion that love is closely related to aggression.
De Lancey seems well aware of the sly diversions, detours and slippages by which a primal aggression is sublimated and it is worth suggesting, I feel, that a refusal to entertain the repressions which initiate sublimation contributes to the unapologetically sinister vision he brings to Shakespeare’s play. To see aggression in love, or to treat love as a sublimation of wilful and egocentric desires, moreover, allows for a number of startling re-readings of Shakespeare’s work. To offer but one example, it becomes possible to question Titania’s avowed motivation for her estrangement from Oberon. Her anger stems from her refusal to part with a ‘changeling’, a child (who, incidentally, happens to be from India, another of England’s post-colonies) for whom Titania seems to regard with as much affection as obligation:
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood;
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following, — her womb then rich with my young squire, --
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake I do rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
(II, i, 123-137)
Titania appears to suggest that her maternal instincts trump those of sexual desire and persuasion or fidelity and obeisance to men or masculine will. As close readers of Shakespeare’s play will know, however, Titania’s refusal to give up the changeling boy to Oberon may well stem from a different grievance, which may well be hinted at in the first words that she speaks in the play when she encounters Oberon in the woods: ‘What! Jealous Oberon. Fairies skip hence.’ (II, i, 61-2) The plot thickens nicely over the course of the dialogue, and it becomes apparent that Oberon and Titania’s estrangement may owe much more to sexual waywardness than anything else:
Obe. Tarry, rash wanton! Am I not thy Lord?
Tita. Then, I must be thy lady; but I know
When thou hast stol’n away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the furthest steppe of India?
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.
Obe. How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,
Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigouna, whom he ravished?
And make him with fair Ægle break his faith,
With Ariadne, and Antiopa?
Tita. These are the forgeries of jealousy…
(II, i, 63-81)
It may well be that Oberon’s jealousy is not forged, and that Titania’s wilfulness, despite her own protestations, is actually motivated by her jealousy of Oberon’s infatuation with Hippolyta. Hippolyta makes the point with reference to Corin and Phillida, names which may well refer to the old English Ballad Phillida and Corydon, and its celebration of ‘Maying’ and the ‘May game’, a traditional English custom celebrating the arrival of summer, fertility and, of course, wooings, courtships, and marriages:
In the merrie moneth of Maye,
In a morne by break of daye,
With a troope of damselles playing
Forthe 'I yode' forsooth a maying.
When anon by a wood side,
Where that Maye was in his pride,
I espied all alone
Phillida and Corydon.
(from A Book of Old English Ballads, 69)
The ballad tells of the ardour and turmoil of young love; the man’s attempts to woo and the lady’s coy demurrals, before concluding happily enough:
Love, that had bene long deluded,
Was with kisses sweete concluded;
And Phillida with garlands gaye
Was made the lady of the Maye.
(ibid.)
According to CL Barber, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has effected a May game of his own:
[In] developing a May game at length to express the will in nature that is consummated in marriage [Shakespeare brings out] underlying magical meanings of the ritual….This Maying can be thought of as happening on a midsummer night, even on Midsummer Eve itself, so that its accidents are complicated by the delusions of a magic time… the Maying is completed when Oberon and Titania with their trains come into the great chamber to bring blessings of fertility. They are at once common and special, as May king and queen making their good luck visit to the manor house, and a pair of country gods, half-English and half Ovid, come to bring their powers in tribute of lords and ladies.
(Barber in Tanner 2010 116)
Titania’s reference to the May rituals, however, are less whimsical than the ballad, and decorous than the ritual. Her charge, in fact, is that Oberon has himself been seduced by the accidents and complications of May’s amorous magic, and that this has resulted in infidelity with Hippolyta who, as ‘warrior love’ seems hopelessly unsuited to the role of ‘May Queen’.
Yet Barber’s reference to Ovid in such close relation to the occasion of Maying is problematic. Tanner notes Ovid is everywhere in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that exports predominantly English and Celtic fairies and folklore to Athens as a means of effecting ‘…an accommodation, an assimilation of the ancient world of pagan, classical legend into the local, domestic world of folklore and popular vernacular superstition […] combining an extensive literary heritage with age-old English customs. [sic]’ (Tanner 115) Tanner proceeds to argue that Shakespeare, in paying homage to the classical world, turns to Ovid, another poet concerned with metamorphoses, but that he does so in a manner designed to assuage the more disturbing or violent conditions which governed Ovid’s transformations.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the most obvious reference to Ovid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Mechanicals’ travesty of the story of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. It is equally unsurprising that this story has far more sinister undertones in its original context. In the Metamorphoses, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is one of stories appearing within the frame narrative, ‘The Daughters of Minyas’. This larger story concerns the fate of Alcithoe and her sisters, daughters of Minyas, who choose to stay indoors to do their usual housework and, more importantly to spin (a word which, as Tanner points out calls to mind not only the act of weaving thread, but also stories) during a feast day for the god Bacchus. Their refusal to participate in festivities amounts to a denial of the god’s divinity, an act for which they are duly punished:
The tale was done, but still the girls worked on,
Scorning the god, dishonouring the feast,
When suddenly the crash of unforeseen drums
Clamoured, and fifes and jangling brass
Resounded, and the air was sweet with scents
Of myrrh and saffron, and—beyond belief!--
The weaving all turned green, the hanging cloth
Grew leaves of ivy, part became vine,
What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp
Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen,
Matching the purple with their coloured sheen.
And now the day was spent, the hour stole on
When one would doubt if it were light or dark,
Some lingering light at night’s vague borderlands.
(Ovid Metamorphoses Book IV 398-418 in Tanner, 117)
For Tanner, what this story addresses, ‘…is the potentially terrifying—as well as savagely beautiful—power there is in the Dionysiac forces, and how foolish and dangerous it is to think they can be ignored, defied, or denied. …I am sure that Shakespeare is very much aware of these Dionysiac monitory fables hovering just outside the edges of his own play, and I think the implicit answer of his play is that the wisest way to recognise and accommodate Dionysus-Bacchus, is through, by, in—marriage.’ (Tanner 119) And also, perhaps, by allowing Ovid to speak most plainly, but also most unthreateningly, through the travesty performed by Bottom and the Mechanicals.
It interests me therefore, that de Lancey’s version of Shakespeare’s Dream should seem so tumultuously Ovidian. It would be imprudent to speculate whether de Lancey had read Tanner, or whether he knew of the Ovidian pretext to Shakespeare, or even if he had, unconsciously, felt and responded to the pressure of Ovid’s presence—divested of its disturbing connotations—within Shakespeare’s Dream. Nor would I wish to entertain the speculation that de Lancey’s willingness to court the Ovidian subtexts reconciled by marriage in Shakespeare’s play depends upon his own position as a reader of English texts at the margins of England and less bound to honour the conventions and traditions which allow for settled, standard, or conventional readings of the play. De Lancey, after all, recalled Lesley Fiedler’s historicist critique of Shakespeare’s ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ as he wondered aloud about what ‘conventional’ Shakespeare might mean. In doing so, he also implied that he does not believe, as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘traditional’ readings of Shakespeare must, the assumption that Shakespeare’s identity is ever settled. The performance, the version, the reading is all we ever have.
Whether this is I fact the case remains open to debate. What is more certain (and, I think, more interesting) is that Ovid shines through the Mechanicals’ rendering of Shakespeare’s Dream more clearly than ever before. This is due, perhaps, to the possibility that by inverting Shakespeare de Lancey also inverts Shakespeare’s initial inversion of Ovid’s violence, thereby reinvesting it with its originally Dionysian tone. If our own age responds more readily to violence and spectacle, if this is somehow more ‘relevant’ to us than Shakespeare’s complex subtleties, and if this is the vein mined by de Lancey and the Mechanicals, it is worth remembering that it is there, in the substance of the plays themselves, and that it has been there all this time. That it may only emerge at a certain time and also, probably, in a particular place recalls nothing so much as Jorge Luis Borges’ suggestion that there can be no problem, ‘as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation.’ (Borges, 2002: 15)
—Simon van Schalkwyk
In memory of Stephen Watson, who taught me the importance of having to be prepared to receive that which art has to offer.
Special thanks to Guy de Lancey for his time and equanimity in conversation.
References
A Book of Old English Ballads at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/boeb/boeb07.htm accessed, April 2011.
Borges, JL ‘The Homeric Versions’ translated and edited by by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz in Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002)
‘William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at http://www.themechanicals.co.za/dream.html accessed, April, 2011.
Shakespeare: Complete Works edited with a glossary by WJ Craig (Oxford university Press: London, 1974)
Tanner, T ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)’ in Tony Tanner: Prefaces to Shakespeare with a foreword by Stephen Heath (The Belknap Press: Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2010)
[1] See, for instance, the PDF copies of reviews on the Mechanicals’ website: http://www.themechanicals.co.za/dream.html.
[2] The dichotomy between supposedly ‘settled’ text and ‘fluid’ performance is destabilised to some degree when it is considered that Shakespeare’s play texts exist not only in different forms and editions (the folio, the quarto etc.) but that they have been standardised for the purpose of canonisation. The standardised or canonical ‘work’ is merely the polished surface glossing over a number of supposedly compromised ‘versions’. The question of a Shakespearean play’s relation to its ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ context, again, is debatable. There are versions of Hamlet, for instance, in which the Prince of Denmark’s celebrated soliloquies differ remarkably depending on whether the play was performed in town or country.
[3] Or, perhaps, they acknowledge and exploit the more pragmatic and unavoidable commercial value of advertising the spectacular in order to draw audiences. It is as if Shakespeare needs to shout more and more loudly in order to be heard over the drone, clamour, and white noise of an increasingly spectacular world of media and multimedia.
Thou art translated.
(III, i, 124-5)
Out of doubt he is transported.
(IV, I, 3-4)
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), presented by ‘The Mechanicals’ and directed by Guy De Lancey opened to positive reviews at The Intimate Theatre, Cape Town this March. The performance, roundly praised for its ‘dark’ and ‘unconventional’ approach to an essentially comic play, offers yet another opportunity to reflect upon the situation of Shakespeare in South Africa.[1]
These reflections are initiated by questions pertaining not only to the manner in which Shakespeare’s play-texts—which are generally accepted as canonical, settled works of genius—are translated into the more fluid medium of dramatic performance (as if that were not difficult enough already) but also upon the situation and re-situation of his works long after and far from their ‘original’ contexts, in ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘foreign’ places and at different times. Shakespeare’s plays are transported; in the transfer (from text to stage, through time, from place to place) they are also translated from their presumably ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ setting in Elizabethan England as they are performed elsewhere, and else-when, and always in a different key. [2] If this seems to suggest, simply, the commonplace that art travels, any interest in Shakespeare’s translation within a South African context is vexed further still (if such were possible!) by questions pertaining to the (presumably) marginal colony to the Imperial centre; the place of English, as a ‘colonial’ language, within a ‘post-colonial’ setting; the place of Shakespeare, as the poet of British imperialism, as a continuing presence among a community of naturalised post-imperial settlers who may treasure Shakespeare as a nostalgic symbol of a distant heritage, former subalterns who may not, and others who fall uncomfortably in-between.
It would be difficult, and slightly unfair, to apply this rather nebulous set of concerns to Guy de Lancey and the Mechanicals’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the popular reviews intimate when they praise the purportedly ‘unconventional’ approach to the play (one reviewer insists that this production is unlike any Shakespeare he has seen, another revels in the suggestion that the production turns Shakespeare’s rather twee dream into a nightmare)
Shakespeare is somewhat old-fashioned, dated, tiresome, in desperate need of some serious shaking up. The blurb on the Mechanicals’ web-page with its use of epithets such as ‘inspired’, ‘hallucinogenic’, ‘atmospheric’, and its presentation of the play as ‘a portal into a nightmarish landscape of obsession and desire, steering away from any cliché’d [sic] notions of a frivolous fairy kingdom that may be attached to the text’, appears to reinforces such readings which, commonplace though they may be, announce a general desire for the excesses of spectacle.[3] Yet if these opinions suggest a desire to announce ‘our’ distance from Shakespeare’s world, to insist that Shakespeare speak in ‘our’ voices and that he speak to ‘our’ concerns, I feel that there is much more to be said about the dynamic interaction between the ‘conventional’ or clichéd assumptions about the play and the ‘unconventional’ version. De Lancey and the The Mechanicals’ do not issue a complete break with convention in favour of a narcissistic pursuit of spectacle.
The epigraphs bracketing more spectacular advertisement for the play on the Mechanicals’ web-page, for instance, seem to suggest that the company is presenting Shakespeare, not simply as spectacle, but according to carefully selected set of mediations. This version of the play, therefore, is framed by statements by Nietzsche (‘Believe me, man’s truest madness is disclosed to him in dreams’) and Anna Freud (‘It always takes two events to create a trauma – one occurring in reality, and the other in the representation of that reality. Or, at least, in the discourse of others involving the person at the centre of the event.’) This, then, is Shakespeare seen through the lens of twentieth-century discourses on dreams, madness, and existential trauma. More broadly, we might imagine that the presiding spirits hovering on the edges of de Lancey’s Shakespeare are Nietzsche’s will-to-power on the one hand, and Post-Freudian psychoanalytical ‘hollowing out’ of the subject on the other. The tension ought to be immediately apparent: if Nietzsche had been the prophet of an egocentric imposition of will upon the other, students of Freud (or, perhaps, Sartre’s existentialism) dispel such agency with the suggestion that the self is always limited by its entrapment in the discourse of the other.
It seems useful to imagine, therefore, that if this adaptation follows the well-known contours of Shakespeare’s text relatively closely, does so to enter into creative dialogue with more conventional readings of the play’s genre, tone, and occasion. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is classed as a comedy, de Lancey and co. suggest that the humour is meant to disturb rather than to entertain; if the tone of Shakespeare’s Dream is conventionally regarded as light and airy, de Lancey’s version seems dark and earthy; if, as Tony Tanner has suggested, the play had originally been written for a celebratory occasion—‘probably a noble wedding in a great house’—here incumbent marriage seems anything but the occasion for celebration. Inversions such as these only work in relation to some acknowledgement of conventional alternatives.
The difference is largely motivated by de Lancey’s commitment to inversion, and it is interesting to consider that the extent of this inversion in relation to the play ad the performances’ respective attitudes towards love and marriage. If the troubled movement toward marriage, which remains present in more conventional readings of the play, anticipates a happy reconciliation, de Lancey and the mechanicals appear to suggest that marriage presents a less satisfactory answer to pre-marital discord. This is apparent, along with the aforementioned keynotes of madness and entrapment, in the seemingly incongruous opening of de Lancey’s adaptation. Here we find a giggling Theseus (Adam Neill) holding up a length of thread, which he examines with manic glee. It gradually emerges, as Theseus’ laughter continues to rise, that the thread leads to and binds a suitably unimpressed Hippolyta (Danieyella Rodin). The fact that Hippolyta remains bound to Theseus for the remainder of the play, and that she resists such bondage as well as she might, suggests that impending marriage, in this instance at least, is invested with the sadistic (if not quite sado-masochistic) power of the relationship characterised by the dialectic between master and servant.
Nor is this the only instance, nor indeed the sole manner of representing, matrimonial bonds. Oberon (Scott Sparrow) trails a thick coil of rope behind him and, much later, Fairy (a composite of Pease-Blossom, Moth, Mustard-Seed and Cobweb played by Dorian Burstein) weaves lengths of twine around Bottom (Vaneshran Arumugam) when Titania (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots) commands that he be led to her bower (III, i, 205-6). For Oberon, who wears a bloodstained tunic that recalls an unfastened straitjacket, severance from the bonds of marriage seems to lead to unbounded madness. With respect to Titania, on the other hand, the motif of thread and binding has a more seductive connotation but, since the seduction occurs while she is under the magical influence of the flower, Love-in-idleness, it also suggests that she is not herself. Nevertheless, the flower does liberate her sexuality, which is seen to be predatory and deviant, even as her bower anticipates another ‘elfin grot’ and the deathly intimations that go with it:
And there she lulled me asleep,
And There I dreamed, Ah Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
(Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci 1996, 843, ll.33-36)
Between the problematically united Theseus and Hippolyta and the estranged Oberon and Titania lie the primary set of relationships and confusions driving the play forward. Lysander (Andrew Laubscher), Hermia (Emily Child) Demetrius (Shaun Acker), and Helena (Julia Anastasopoulos) are all beset by discord primarily due to unhappiness in love and potential marriage. Yet if de Lancey remains ambivalent about the role marriage might play in settling discordant relationships fraught by sexual waywardness, he refuses to revel in the purported delights of sexual waywardness.
This is most evident when Helena, who with the help of Love-in-idleness, finds herself to be the object of both Lysander and Demetrius’ affections, struggles to fend off their attentions. The physicality with which the players dramatise desire here seems comical at first but with time it comes to seem nothing if not disturbing. Lysander and Demetrius grope, grab, smother and tug at Helena, and her attempts to maintain some kind of composure soon descends into a more primal urge to save herself from being physically overwhelmed by her suitors’ ‘love’. If love consumes, de Lancey suggests, the physical expression of that love may well threatens, quite literally, to tear us apart. Amid the squalling complaints and exaggerated declamations and the wearying and terrifying physical imposition of body upon body we hear the echo of Freud’s suggestion that love is closely related to aggression.
De Lancey seems well aware of the sly diversions, detours and slippages by which a primal aggression is sublimated and it is worth suggesting, I feel, that a refusal to entertain the repressions which initiate sublimation contributes to the unapologetically sinister vision he brings to Shakespeare’s play. To see aggression in love, or to treat love as a sublimation of wilful and egocentric desires, moreover, allows for a number of startling re-readings of Shakespeare’s work. To offer but one example, it becomes possible to question Titania’s avowed motivation for her estrangement from Oberon. Her anger stems from her refusal to part with a ‘changeling’, a child (who, incidentally, happens to be from India, another of England’s post-colonies) for whom Titania seems to regard with as much affection as obligation:
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood;
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following, — her womb then rich with my young squire, --
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake I do rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
(II, i, 123-137)
Titania appears to suggest that her maternal instincts trump those of sexual desire and persuasion or fidelity and obeisance to men or masculine will. As close readers of Shakespeare’s play will know, however, Titania’s refusal to give up the changeling boy to Oberon may well stem from a different grievance, which may well be hinted at in the first words that she speaks in the play when she encounters Oberon in the woods: ‘What! Jealous Oberon. Fairies skip hence.’ (II, i, 61-2) The plot thickens nicely over the course of the dialogue, and it becomes apparent that Oberon and Titania’s estrangement may owe much more to sexual waywardness than anything else:
Obe. Tarry, rash wanton! Am I not thy Lord?
Tita. Then, I must be thy lady; but I know
When thou hast stol’n away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the furthest steppe of India?
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.
Obe. How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,
Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night
From Perigouna, whom he ravished?
And make him with fair Ægle break his faith,
With Ariadne, and Antiopa?
Tita. These are the forgeries of jealousy…
(II, i, 63-81)
It may well be that Oberon’s jealousy is not forged, and that Titania’s wilfulness, despite her own protestations, is actually motivated by her jealousy of Oberon’s infatuation with Hippolyta. Hippolyta makes the point with reference to Corin and Phillida, names which may well refer to the old English Ballad Phillida and Corydon, and its celebration of ‘Maying’ and the ‘May game’, a traditional English custom celebrating the arrival of summer, fertility and, of course, wooings, courtships, and marriages:
In the merrie moneth of Maye,
In a morne by break of daye,
With a troope of damselles playing
Forthe 'I yode' forsooth a maying.
When anon by a wood side,
Where that Maye was in his pride,
I espied all alone
Phillida and Corydon.
(from A Book of Old English Ballads, 69)
The ballad tells of the ardour and turmoil of young love; the man’s attempts to woo and the lady’s coy demurrals, before concluding happily enough:
Love, that had bene long deluded,
Was with kisses sweete concluded;
And Phillida with garlands gaye
Was made the lady of the Maye.
(ibid.)
According to CL Barber, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has effected a May game of his own:
[In] developing a May game at length to express the will in nature that is consummated in marriage [Shakespeare brings out] underlying magical meanings of the ritual….This Maying can be thought of as happening on a midsummer night, even on Midsummer Eve itself, so that its accidents are complicated by the delusions of a magic time… the Maying is completed when Oberon and Titania with their trains come into the great chamber to bring blessings of fertility. They are at once common and special, as May king and queen making their good luck visit to the manor house, and a pair of country gods, half-English and half Ovid, come to bring their powers in tribute of lords and ladies.
(Barber in Tanner 2010 116)
Titania’s reference to the May rituals, however, are less whimsical than the ballad, and decorous than the ritual. Her charge, in fact, is that Oberon has himself been seduced by the accidents and complications of May’s amorous magic, and that this has resulted in infidelity with Hippolyta who, as ‘warrior love’ seems hopelessly unsuited to the role of ‘May Queen’.
Yet Barber’s reference to Ovid in such close relation to the occasion of Maying is problematic. Tanner notes Ovid is everywhere in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that exports predominantly English and Celtic fairies and folklore to Athens as a means of effecting ‘…an accommodation, an assimilation of the ancient world of pagan, classical legend into the local, domestic world of folklore and popular vernacular superstition […] combining an extensive literary heritage with age-old English customs. [sic]’ (Tanner 115) Tanner proceeds to argue that Shakespeare, in paying homage to the classical world, turns to Ovid, another poet concerned with metamorphoses, but that he does so in a manner designed to assuage the more disturbing or violent conditions which governed Ovid’s transformations.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the most obvious reference to Ovid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Mechanicals’ travesty of the story of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. It is equally unsurprising that this story has far more sinister undertones in its original context. In the Metamorphoses, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is one of stories appearing within the frame narrative, ‘The Daughters of Minyas’. This larger story concerns the fate of Alcithoe and her sisters, daughters of Minyas, who choose to stay indoors to do their usual housework and, more importantly to spin (a word which, as Tanner points out calls to mind not only the act of weaving thread, but also stories) during a feast day for the god Bacchus. Their refusal to participate in festivities amounts to a denial of the god’s divinity, an act for which they are duly punished:
The tale was done, but still the girls worked on,
Scorning the god, dishonouring the feast,
When suddenly the crash of unforeseen drums
Clamoured, and fifes and jangling brass
Resounded, and the air was sweet with scents
Of myrrh and saffron, and—beyond belief!--
The weaving all turned green, the hanging cloth
Grew leaves of ivy, part became vine,
What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp
Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen,
Matching the purple with their coloured sheen.
And now the day was spent, the hour stole on
When one would doubt if it were light or dark,
Some lingering light at night’s vague borderlands.
(Ovid Metamorphoses Book IV 398-418 in Tanner, 117)
For Tanner, what this story addresses, ‘…is the potentially terrifying—as well as savagely beautiful—power there is in the Dionysiac forces, and how foolish and dangerous it is to think they can be ignored, defied, or denied. …I am sure that Shakespeare is very much aware of these Dionysiac monitory fables hovering just outside the edges of his own play, and I think the implicit answer of his play is that the wisest way to recognise and accommodate Dionysus-Bacchus, is through, by, in—marriage.’ (Tanner 119) And also, perhaps, by allowing Ovid to speak most plainly, but also most unthreateningly, through the travesty performed by Bottom and the Mechanicals.
It interests me therefore, that de Lancey’s version of Shakespeare’s Dream should seem so tumultuously Ovidian. It would be imprudent to speculate whether de Lancey had read Tanner, or whether he knew of the Ovidian pretext to Shakespeare, or even if he had, unconsciously, felt and responded to the pressure of Ovid’s presence—divested of its disturbing connotations—within Shakespeare’s Dream. Nor would I wish to entertain the speculation that de Lancey’s willingness to court the Ovidian subtexts reconciled by marriage in Shakespeare’s play depends upon his own position as a reader of English texts at the margins of England and less bound to honour the conventions and traditions which allow for settled, standard, or conventional readings of the play. De Lancey, after all, recalled Lesley Fiedler’s historicist critique of Shakespeare’s ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ as he wondered aloud about what ‘conventional’ Shakespeare might mean. In doing so, he also implied that he does not believe, as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘traditional’ readings of Shakespeare must, the assumption that Shakespeare’s identity is ever settled. The performance, the version, the reading is all we ever have.
Whether this is I fact the case remains open to debate. What is more certain (and, I think, more interesting) is that Ovid shines through the Mechanicals’ rendering of Shakespeare’s Dream more clearly than ever before. This is due, perhaps, to the possibility that by inverting Shakespeare de Lancey also inverts Shakespeare’s initial inversion of Ovid’s violence, thereby reinvesting it with its originally Dionysian tone. If our own age responds more readily to violence and spectacle, if this is somehow more ‘relevant’ to us than Shakespeare’s complex subtleties, and if this is the vein mined by de Lancey and the Mechanicals, it is worth remembering that it is there, in the substance of the plays themselves, and that it has been there all this time. That it may only emerge at a certain time and also, probably, in a particular place recalls nothing so much as Jorge Luis Borges’ suggestion that there can be no problem, ‘as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation.’ (Borges, 2002: 15)
—Simon van Schalkwyk
In memory of Stephen Watson, who taught me the importance of having to be prepared to receive that which art has to offer.
Special thanks to Guy de Lancey for his time and equanimity in conversation.
References
A Book of Old English Ballads at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/boeb/boeb07.htm accessed, April 2011.
Borges, JL ‘The Homeric Versions’ translated and edited by by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz in Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002)
‘William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at http://www.themechanicals.co.za/dream.html accessed, April, 2011.
Shakespeare: Complete Works edited with a glossary by WJ Craig (Oxford university Press: London, 1974)
Tanner, T ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)’ in Tony Tanner: Prefaces to Shakespeare with a foreword by Stephen Heath (The Belknap Press: Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2010)
[1] See, for instance, the PDF copies of reviews on the Mechanicals’ website: http://www.themechanicals.co.za/dream.html.
[2] The dichotomy between supposedly ‘settled’ text and ‘fluid’ performance is destabilised to some degree when it is considered that Shakespeare’s play texts exist not only in different forms and editions (the folio, the quarto etc.) but that they have been standardised for the purpose of canonisation. The standardised or canonical ‘work’ is merely the polished surface glossing over a number of supposedly compromised ‘versions’. The question of a Shakespearean play’s relation to its ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ context, again, is debatable. There are versions of Hamlet, for instance, in which the Prince of Denmark’s celebrated soliloquies differ remarkably depending on whether the play was performed in town or country.
[3] Or, perhaps, they acknowledge and exploit the more pragmatic and unavoidable commercial value of advertising the spectacular in order to draw audiences. It is as if Shakespeare needs to shout more and more loudly in order to be heard over the drone, clamour, and white noise of an increasingly spectacular world of media and multimedia.
